Summary

Owner

Current status

Detailed Description

virtio-scsi improves the storage stack in terms of scalability (easily overcomes the current limit of ~30 freely hot-pluggable/unpluggable storage devices), flexibility (support features such as SCSI passthrough or persistent reservations), extensibility (exposing new features to the guest does not require updating drivers in both the host and the guest).

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora users will be able to use an industry-standard storage stack for their virtual machines.

Scope

The guest driver will be included as part of the distribution's kernel and as part of the seabios ROMs installed together with QEMU. The host drivers will be included in the qemu package. Management tools based on libvirt should support this too.

How To Test

Install the qemu-kvm package.

Download an install image for this release of Fedora (network or DVD).

Prepare a large file to be used as the disk for a Fedora virtual machine.

Dependencies

Contingency Plan

Each piece (kernel, qemu, libvirt) can be included separately, so there is no need to revert partial changes.

Documentation

Documentation will be included as part of the changes to libvirt.

Release Notes

KVM and libvirt support a new advanced SCSI-based storage stack, virtio-scsi. Right now, virtio-scsi can be used on guests running Fedora 17. It should be included in the mainline kernel starting at release 3.4.